With the advent of 6th edition and my recent painting experience in Cardiff, I have decided to re-visit my characters. Since the chaplain became down regulated as a marine killing powerhouse (with his AP 4 maul), I have decided to take a captain instead. 'For the love of the God Emperor why?' I hear you all shout.
I admit it's a difficult decision to justify but my somewhat flimsy reasons are two fold:
1) I believe you need a character that can really dish out the pain in close combat and be capable of killing many marines at once. The changes to fearless (or know no fear) means that every last marine must die! The captain is the only real choice when it comes to building this kind of character. The captain is also reasonably cheap at just 100pts, I have only given him twin lightning claws for 30pts the pair. He will be getting 6 attacks on the charge (chapter standard) with re-rolls to hit (chaplain) and re-rolls to wound. That should hopefully be 5 dead marines on the charge and about 4 every round. Yes, I think Tycho is a better choice at doing this but that brings me onto the second reason...
2) I need to add character to my army. What I mean by this is I need to create a personality for the force and a conversion to match. A main criticism of my army at Cardiff was the lack of a unifying theme within the force. Yes they were all on matching bases, yes the colours were the same. But people felt the army lacked a 'character' or 'theme', which I put down to a general lack of conversions and a heavy reliance on the beautiful plastics in the blood angels kits.
As such, I have decided to replace my characters with some nice new converted ones and try and tie that character in with the ideas of the force as a whole. Hence Captain Janus Theodramis, see I named him and everything! I wanted him to be a young captain who received his rank on the field of battle after slaying an ork warboss in personal combat. I wanted him to have been an assault marine (the youngest recruits in the blood angels structure) originally and so represent a very unusual situation. I want him to convey aggression and the thirst for blood, which has not yet been tempered with age. I also didn't want to cover him in honour markings as his career is only just being established. Maybe I'll add them to the model as I use him? His honour guard have been taken from his original squad, whom where with him throughout the battle and I'll be building them all up to have personalities of their own in order to create a unit that oozes character and a sense of story.
So there you have it. I also intend to scratch build a new chaplain similar to the one featured on FTW. It's a fantastic build if you have not already seen it.
